When Vogue photographer Lee Miller crossed into war-torn Europe and proved with her stark, black-and-white photographs of the Nazi concentration camps how the people were suffering during World War ll, her magazine did not print the pictures, because they would be too distressing for readers.

The courageous woman, who believed that as a journalist it was her duty to bear witness, did not flinch when faced with terrible scenes of war crimes and cruel deaths, and today, some of the photographs that were published and others that were found in the attic of her home after her death show how compelling and profoundly impactful her war photography was and how it fearlessly documented the excesses of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.

Lee, a film on her life directed by Ellen Kuras, in which the redoubtable Kate Winslet plays her, is now streaming (on LionsgatePlay) and is important because it gives a female war correspondent her due place in the journalistic firmament. At a time when there were few women in the all-boys’ club of journalists, and the ones that managed to crash the room were given soft 'feminine' assignments, Lee Miller not just responded to the sneering Cecil Beaton (well-known photographer) by taking great pictures but pushed herself into the forbidden zone of war photography.

Apart from the excellent film, there have been documentaries and books on her—one by her son Antony Penrose, on which the Kuras film is based—and the Tate Britain in London has organised a vast new Lee Miller exhibition (that runs till February 2026), the most........

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